Five by Five

I’ve tried to resist the urge to write a post on the latest flavour of the month Google’s venture into the Browser market Chrome, guess my resistance isn’t that great. Being hailed by some as a market changer I have a somewhat more sceptical view of what impact Chrome will have on the market. Whilst there are obviously some good innovations in the browser, the one process per tab thing being in my mind the most notable, what impact will Chrome really have? This has been quite a point of debate here in the Five by Five Tech Team. I decided to give it some time (well 3 weeks!) and have a look at some of the stats I have available to me. Taking a sample of a few sites with widely different audiences I thought I’d take a look at the impact Chrome has had.

Using a UK based consumer site, a European based consumer site, and a Global based product site to give a relatively wide spectrum of sites, here are the last three weeks stats:

So what does this tell us? Well not a lot really, its still early days and the stats are from a very narrow time frame. The most interesting thing I can see is when you factor in the type of audience. The UK based consumer site is not for a very tech savvy crowd, nearly 90% of users are using IE, here Chrome has made little difference to the browser share, 0.3% which users these were previously is hard to tell, they could have been IE or Firefox. However if you switch over to the Global site which is very tech savvy, high percentages of Firefox and Opera, Chrome is already at 3.2%, however it would seem that most of these users were previously Firefox users, perhaps a worrying sign for Mozilla?

I can’t say I am surprised by these stats and to be honest, it’s what I’d expect given that the only users of Chrome will more than likely be the tech savvy early adopters. Google’s challenge will be to get the browser out to the masses, and if anyone is going to succeed in this it’s them. What impact overall they have remains to be seen, as I’ve said before, one of the keys to breaking Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market is if they can also get into the enterprise market, something which Mozilla is probably still failing to do.

Even if Chrome doesn’t manage to become a mainstream browser, hopefully at least it will help drive innovation further in the browser market, something which has been a very hot topic this year.

2008 is looking like a good year for standards, or is it? The browser wars continue to rumble on, Firefox, Opera and Safari all have recent updates which push their standards compliance forward yet another notch. IE continues to lag behind, but has a new browser round the corner with better, if not ground breaking, support. Could development finally be getting easier for us developers? I’d like to think it was, but the sad reality is that even with all these advancements in support it will be a few years yet before we can reap the rewards.

Even though it is two years since IE7 was launched and IE8 will hopefully be released at the back end of this year or early next it doesn’t mean a great deal to the now. IE6 is still around and is likely to be around for some time to come. The simple reason behind this is that IE6 still commands a high percentage of browser share, likely due to corporations who have applications that are dependent on IE6 features and people who are unable to update IE6 for lets say “legal” reasons. The lack of adoption of Vista contributes to this, all of which means that although it is a blot on the browser landscape IE6 will continue to be a thorn in our sides.

It would take a very bold client to ignore such a high percentage of their potential users, especially when one of the users tends to be themselves or their boss. So for all the strides browser vendors are making in standards support, if we cannot reliably use it, the frustration remains! Some people are making tentative steps in the “right” direction, 37 signals, for instance have announced that from August they are dropping full support for IE6 for some of their products. Unfortunately cases such as this are very much in the minority.

So the future still promises to be rosier, but for the moment it’s still a distant dream…